Q Review LIVES - Coldplay live review and interview [Q Magazine (October 2009)]
COLDPLAY
For Chris Martin, sorry seems to be the easiest word…
Rogers Centre, Toronto, Canada THURSDAY, 30 JULY 2009 ★★★★
“When you take away the stage set, we feel naked.” JONNY BUCKLAND
No one apologises quite like Chris Martin. Onstage and off, the word “sorry” or a close variant thereof is never more than a few minutes from the Coldplay singer’s lips. During the course of this evening, for instance, he will verbally flagellate himself for everything from the state of his hair to the fact that his band have, in his eyes at least, shoddily neglected Britain and their British fans when it comes to touring their last album, Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends. For a man who fronts one of the most successful bands on the planet, with all the attendant lifestyle perks that brings, this is a strange state of affairs.
“Oh God, I thought all that had gone out of the window years ago,” says Coldplay drummer Will Champion after the show, still clad in the regulation 19th-century French army cast-offs that constitute the band’s stage costume. He’s perched straight-backed and attentive alongside similarly attired guitarist Jonny Buckland on a comfy green leather sofa in a small, dimly-lit room signposted “Chill Out Room”, somewhere under the banks of seats that line Toronto’s Rogers Centre.
Unlike their singer, Buckland and Champion are neither habitually apologetic nor twitchily energetic. Instead, they’re friendly, impeccably polite and not given to public bouts of self-recrimination. It’s the drummer’s 31st birthday celebrations today; within minutes of meeting Q, he’s invited us along to a party at a swanky boutique hotel on the other side of Toronto’s city centre. Having known each other since school, they’re more than familiar with their singer’s penchant for apologising.
“At the early gigs, he’d say sorry 500 times a night onstage,” says Champion. “The year 2000, I think that was the height of the apologies.”
A bulging white dome that nuzzles the base of the needle-like CN Tower (at 1815 feet, one of the world’s tallest structures), the giant concrete soufflé that is the Rogers Centre hosts the 140th date of the Viva La Vida tour. A 44,000 stadium that’s usually home to baseball team the Toronto Blue Jays, tonight it is stage to the biggest solo headlining show of the band’s career, something which Buckland and Champion confess to being daunted by (“We were quite nervous,” admits the guitarist afterwards, with characteristic understatement).
These nerves aren’t in evidence before the show. The hollering, shouting and general bustle of industry that usually soundtracks concerts of this scale are all noticeably absent, replaced by a tangible air of calm. Even the security guards offer a smile as you pass.
An hour before playing, the four members of Coldplay can be found in a curtained-off room, just off the two-lane subterranean road that circles the inside of this giant stadium. They’re dutifully taking part in a meet-and-greet with fans, exchanging pleasantries and handing over signed copies of LeftRightLeftRightLeft, the free CD they’ve given away at every date on this leg of the tour (presumably at great expense). Following this, there’s a presentation of platinum discs to the band and some celebratory champagne for birthday boy Champion.
As proceedings draw to a close, Martin catches Q’s eye and wanders over. He’s already wearing his Les Misérables-style stage costume, albeit barefoot. His hair explodes from his head in cherubic curls, the longest it’s been for years. Up close, he looks tired and drawn; it’s been a hectic time, and the band only arrived at the venue 20 minutes ago, having filmed an appearance on Carson Daly’s talk show. Still, he’s charm personified, thanking us for making the trip over (which is no problem) and asking if we’ve been treated well (we have). The singer isn’t officially doing any interviews, but he still wants to talk. “Are you sticking around? There’s a couple of questions I want to ask you,” before proceeding to pleasantly grill Q as to the current state of the music press.
With many other rock stars, this could easily be seen as a deliberate and possibly cynical charm offensive. But with Martin, it’s both genuine and entirely in character: there’s none of the supreme bluff of a Noel Gallagher or the bullet-proof confidence of a Bono here, just a winning blend of affability, insecurity and peculiar need for approval. As his bandmates head back to the dressing room, we drift into the corridor. Talk turns to tonight’s gig (“[Perturbed] This is our biggest show, so I’m worried the stage set might look a bit small for the venue”), his concerns that people in Britain, even Coldplay’s own fans, hate the band (“[Aghast] We played one gig, and the reaction after the first song was terrible. I felt like a rapist”), and the forthcoming Wembley gigs (“It’s such a big thing. I think we’ll be OK. Do you think we’ll be OK? Sorry, shouldn’t ask you”).
After 10 minutes, he needs to head off. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I really need to go and get my head together. [Frown] Are you going to be OK? [Concern] Let me know if there’s anything you need. [Beaming smile] I’ll see you later, right?”
Conversation over, he lollops away, jogging around the track and back to his dressing room.
Out front, the Rogers Centre is slowly filling up. Rows of chairs line the playing field, ensuring there’s no embarrassing gap at the back. It must be a daunting sight for tonight’s hand-picked all-British support line-up, not least rockabilly revivalists Kitty, Daisy & Lewis. This is the teen sibling trio’s very first tour, and while they acquit themselves admirably in front of a half-full venue, they’ve yet to master touring etiquette (“I saw them watching us at the side of the stage at one show, brazenly smoking,” said Martin earlier. “I was like, [Waves hands] Er, could you just do that a bit more out of sight”). Even old hands Elbow look like they’re struggling to come to terms with the scale of it, though a combination of Guy Garvey’s gruff Northern charisma and eternally uplifting closer One Day Like This conspire to win over several thousand previously diffident Canadians.
“We’ve got used to these bigger gigs,” says Buckland. “You can’t actually see the audience. Do we miss the intimacy of small shows? In all honestly, no. We do occasionally do smaller shows, where you can see what people are ordering to drink. Those gigs are absolutely terrifying for us. When you take away all the stage set, we feel naked.”
If intimacy is a long-vanished concept for Coldplay, the quartet have certainly raised their game on a visual level. This is the summer of the stadium spectacular, with everyone from U2 (giant claw) to Take That (huge circus) offering more bang for your buck, and Coldplay haven’t been left behind. Not that there weren’t teething troubles.
“At one point we had a trampoline at the end of one of the walkways,” says Champion. “It was a little trampette, like you get with pommel horses. The idea was that Chris would run down, jump on it and go flying through the air. It was all well and good, but we quickly realised it was going to ruin Chris’s knees.”
It might not be as grand as U2’s current extravaganza, and it may sadly be bereft of opportunities for mid-air gymnastics, but the Coldplay live experience certainly offers its share of spectacle, from the sparklers whirled by the band behind a dark gauze during opener Life In Technicolor to the hundreds of giant balloons launched into the crowd during Yellow. But there’s a winning lack of bombast here: during Lost!, the giant screens that hang from the dome-like roof zoom in on a vintage TV set, itself tuned into Martin’s face.
Unsurprisingly, Martin is the focus of the display. All that nervous energy is channelled into a performance that finds him constantly swirling, spinning, shadow-boxing and dive-bombing – one part lightweight contender at the punchbag, one part hyperactive kid running around the supermarket. During a monumentally abrasive Politik, he sits hunched over his piano like an 18th-century composer, before leaping up and pointing heavenwards (he does this a lot, as if seeking some sort of divine validation).
Sometimes he tries too hard with the self-deprecation. “Some critics say it’s the best value for money we’ve ever given,” he says of the aforementioned free CD. Then there’s his coiffure, a particular butt of his own jokes. “We call this the Michael Bolton tribute section, mainly due to the singer’s hair,” he says before a solo piano version of The Hardest Part. The same song ends with another laboured quip: “The hardest part is having hair like Justin Timberlake just after he left ’N Sync.”
While hardly small of scale on record, the size of the venue suits Coldplay’s expansive music. In this cathedral-like dome, the hymnal qualities of Fix You or Glass Of Water are amplified 10-fold. Even the delicate, Tinariwen-influenced guitar lines of Strawberry Swing take on an unforeseen magnitude.
There are moments that don’t work, not least the clumping “dance” version of God Put A Smile Upon Your Face: performed at the end of a long walkway, it sounds like the sort of remix that might have been buried on a 12-inch B-side in 1986. Much better is the acoustic mini-set, played on a tiny, stand-alone stage in a far corner of the arena. As the rest of the venue goes black, the spotlit quartet rollock through Green Eyes, the Will Champion-sung Death Will Never Conquer and a ramshackle, campfire jam cover of Billie Jean, complete with impressive acoustic guitar solo from Buckland and impressive falsetto squeals from Martin.
The set ends with Champion being dragged out from behind his drumkit and presented with a birthday cake by former manager and “fifth member” Phil Harvey. He looks less sheepish than you’d expect. He certainly doesn’t apologise for getting it.
Post-show, and things are no less sedate than they were before. The distant rumble of trucks hauling away the stage on the other side of the arena aside, the ambience around Coldplay’s dressing room has the air of a slightly funky library. In a few hours’ time, the band, their entourage, plus a hundred or so of Toronto’s more beautiful young things will commandeer the patio of a swanky uptown boutique hotel to celebrate Champion’s birthday (though Martin will be noticeably absent, presumably having sent his apologies).
For now, Champion and Buckland are enjoying a relaxing glass of post-gig, pre-party red wine. In a month, they will start their very first stadium tour, which eventually brings them to Manchester, Dublin, Glasgow and Wembley – the latter, at 80,000 capacity, almost doubling tonight’s record-breaking audience.
“Are we nervous?” says Buckland. “Oh, more nervous than about anything else we’ve done. It’s our home. All our friends will be down. But we’ve done our homework, checked out other concerts. We want it to be an event.”
The pair talk about the support acts at Wembley, Jay-Z and Girls Aloud (“We could have filled it with a load of bands who, to be honest, sound just like us”), and the next Coldplay album, currently little more than a loose assemblage of ideas being worked up on the road (“Our Wikipedia page says it’s due out at the end of the year? Which year?”). Then there’s the band’s debut in a forthcoming episode of The Simpsons.
“They approached us about four months ago,” says Champion. “We’re all fans, so it was a no-brainer. Do we speak? No, only Chris. We have no voices.”
“Story of our lives,” adds Buckland, with a laugh.
And there they go again with the self-deprecation. If they’re not taking the piss out of themselves, they’re apologising for being Coldplay. It’s both endearing and frustrating. What exactly do a bunch of successful, largely acclaimed rock stars have to feel sorry for? There’s a moment of silence from them both.
“We do tend to agonise over things,” says Champion eventually. “Ultimately, we just want to get better. There are so many things we want to do. The whole apology thing, it’s part and parcel of who we are and what we do.”
There’s a pause and a smile.
“Sorry.”
DAVE EVERLEY
THE SET LIST
Life In Technicolor Violet Hill Clocks In My Place Yellow Glass Of Water Cemeteries Of London 42 Fix You Strawberry Swing Talk (Dance Version)/God Put A Smile Upon Your Face The Hardest Part Postcards From Far Away Viva La Vida Lost! Green Eyes Death Will Never Conquer Billie Jean Politik Lovers In Japan Death And All His Friends The Scientist Life In Technicolor ii
Translator's Note: Truly, this October 2009 issue of Q Magazine had given so much for me to scan and read the content.
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